As someone who is early in their career who has to constantly juggle side gigs, hobbies, the cost of living in a city while working a full-time job, my current creative financial goal is to live by this.

– Tools for professionals must pay their rent. –

I recognize fully that there are plenty of reasons people make art/ music/ any other creative medium or practice; but why should it be treated like something that exists outside of the rest of the financial pressures of my life?

Tools in this context can be defined as anything used in one’s creative process, particularly if it is used as an item to complete/ aid in completing any task. I use the term ‘tool’ both to imply a notion of what is useful, and also to be vague enough to cover the wide number of items that could potentially fall under that category.

That being said, these creative tools I have don’t have to pay MY rent, but they certainly have to have a plan towards paying back the cost of me buying and housing the tool.

One of the coolest parts about making things is the fact that the tools you buy have the potential to make whoever uses them enough money to pay back that initial cost of buying, in addition to any other additional cost that they might need. Making stuff in a capitalist economy typically has the effect of making some sort of money for the work. To say it shortly (and over-simply), labor should be paid for, and labor that requires specific skills and tools should be able to pay for those skills and tools as well (even if over a long period of time).

So that being said, I want to leave the reader of this with some homework (doesn’t the concept of homework in a pandemic feel weird?). Take a list of what tools you have, and write down an educated guess of what you paid for it. If you’d like, write down a guess of what you have paid for in classes to better learn how to use those tools. Figure out the sum of all those, and put a mental pin in it.

Use that number as an inspiration to start valuing the work you do a little more, and also think about some ways that you can begin to recoup that using the tools you already have.